“In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wriggle about from side to side; but he couldn’t pick up things with it. But there was one Elephant–a new Elephant–an Elephant’s Child–who was full of ’satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions.”

Moti Guj Mutineer (1891)

“Once upon a time there was a coffee planter in India who wished to clear some forest land for coffee planting. When he had cut down all the trees and burned the under-wood the stumps still remained. Dynamite is expensive and slow-fire slow. The happy medium for stump clearing is the lord of all beasts, who is the elephant.”

Toomai of the Elephants (1894)

“Kala Nag stood ten fair feet at the shoulders, and his tusks had been cut off short at five feet, and bound round the ends, to prevent them splitting, with bands of copper; but he could do more with those stumps than any untrained elephant could do with the real sharpened ones.”

What happens when you hypnotize a person in the moments before he dies? The story that began as a hoax (it was first published without the “fiction” label) is one of the first modern science fiction tales.

Ernest Hemingway wrote: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn … it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

Big-river adventure and biting, laugh-out-loud satire in this classic “Great American Novel.” Narrated by John Jennens.

[Note: Two downloads are required for the complete novel. You can download just the first part if you want, but it might lack the closure you're looking for. Also the podcast includes only a fraction of the book. A good fraction, but still.]

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens is the classic tale of curmudgeon Ebeneezer Scrooge and the visitation of three ghosts (four if you include Marley) in the run up to Christmas. Read by James Spencer.